Radiant gas generators for cooking applications have been proposed in various combinations including deep fryers (U.S. Pat. No. 4,397,298) and ovens (U.S. Pat. No. 4,480,628). The burners or generators in these combinations are of the type in which the burner surface is defined by a ceramic tile structure including a plurality of parallel perforations in the tile structure and wherein a fuel gas mixture is burned at the upper surface of the tile structure to generate the radiant heat used in the cooking process. Whereas the radiant heat burners of the ceramic tile type have been generally satisfactory for general cooking applications, they suffer from the disadvantage that the generated heat tends to peak at the geometric center of the tile surface so that the overlying heating surface is relatively hot adjacent the center of the surface and relatively cool adjacent the perimeter of the surface with the result that the cooking performance of the heating surface varies considerably across the expanse of the heating surface. While this may not represent a problem in deep fryers and ovens, it may present considerable use problems in cooking on a griddle, especially in large batch quantities.